A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team (including running into
Larry Summers on my way to an
appointment in the West Wing, leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the
smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

1) These are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the
country's financial crisis.

2) They are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

Talking about our financial crisis with them is like beaming back to the second century and discussing astronomy with Ptolemy.

Just as Ptolemy was convinced we live in a geocentric universe -- and made the math work to "prove" his flawed theories --
Obama's senior economic team is convinced we live in a bank-centric universe, and keeps offering its versions of "epicycles"
and "eccentric circles" to rationalize their approach to the bailout.

And because, like Ptolemy, they are really smart, they are really good at rationalizing.

It's easy to get lost debating the complexity of each new iteration of each new bailout, but the devil here is not in the
details -- it's in the obsolete cosmology.

If you believe the universe is revolving around the earth -- when, in fact, it isn't -- all the good intentions in the world,
and all the endless nights spent coming up with plans like
Tim Geithner's Public-Private Investment Program, will be for naught.

The successive bailout plans have been frustrating to many observers (yours truly included), but when you realize how fully
the economic team is mired in a bank-centric universe, all the moves suddenly make perfect sense.

Here is one example.

Everybody agrees on the paramount importance of freeing up credit for individuals and businesses.

In a bank-centric universe, the solution was a bailout plan giving hundreds of billions to banks. It failed because, instead
of using the money to make loans, the banks "are keeping it in the bank because their balance sheets had gotten so bad," as the
president himself acknowledged on Jay Leno.

As a result, the administration, again according to the president, had to "set up a securitized market for student loans
and auto loans outside of the banking system" in order to "get credit flowing again."

But think of all the time we wasted while the first scheme predictably failed.

And how much better off we'd now be if we had provided credit directly through credit unions or small, healthy community banks
or, as happened during the Depression, through a new entity like the Reconstruction Finance Corp.

Luckily, there is a plethora of economic Galileos out there who recognize that the old bank-centric cosmology is just
plain wrong.

But while Joseph Stiglitz, Simon Johnson, Jeffrey Sachs, Nassim Taleb, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, etc. are not being
imprisoned for life for their heretical views -- they are also not being listened to. Which is really surprising for an
administration that has prided itself on a "team of rivals" approach.

Worse, as the fundamental flaw in the administration's cosmology becomes more and more evident, the economic team around
the president is closing ranks. Even David Axelrod, once the administration's champion of a more skeptical view of a bank-centric
universe, appears to be peering through the Geithner-Summers telescope.

Back in February, he crossed swords with Tim Geithner, arguing for executive pay caps.

But there he was last Sunday, whiffing on a pro-populist softball offered up by Fox News' Chris Wallace, who asked: "When
taxpayers are putting up most of the money and taking more of the risk, why would the Obama administration allow some of
these executives to get even richer?"

Axelrod's answer?

"On some of these programs, we're asking financial companies to come in and help solve this problem by providing more lending,
by buying up toxic assets and so on. We don't want to create disincentives and undermine the program."

"Asking" them?

Aren't we, in fact, bribing them with massive capital infusions and loan guarantees? That's what being
surrounded by a group of modern day Ptolemys will do to a person.

Which is why it wasn't a shock when it was reported that Summers had received $5.2 million for advising a hedge fund last
year, or that he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from some of the very banks -- including
J.P. Morgan,
Citigroup
and Goldman Sachs -- that have been on the receiving end of billions in taxpayers' money. Billions that
have come with very few strings attached -- and almost no transparency.

I am in no way suggesting there is anything corrupt about this or any quid pro quo involved.

It's just that in a bank-centric universe, funneling no-strings-attached money to too-big-to-fail banks is the logical thing
to do.

So is arguing that the banking crisis is just a liquidity problem rather than an insolvency one, as Geithner continues to
do (and if the stress tests come back declaring Citi solvent, it will be high time to start stress-testing the stress-testers).

In a bank-centric universe, it's also no surprise that "mark-to-market" accounting rules, in which banks have to calculate
and report their assets based on what those assets are actually worth, instead of what they'd like them to be worth, are being
abandoned.

A good name for the reworked accounting standards would be mark-to-fantasy, because that's basically what balance sheets will
be under these new rules.

Of course, to a true believer in bank-centrism, the problem with mark-to-market is that it's not good for the banks. It's
the accounting equivalent of Galileo's telescope.

At the G-20 meeting, Gordon Brown proclaimed that "the old Washington consensus is over."

But when it comes to attacking the financial crisis, the zombie Wall Street / Washington consensus that has everything in
America orbiting around the banks is still the order of the day.

The longer bank-centrism is the dominant cosmology in the Obama administration -- and the longer it takes to switch to a plan
that reflects a cosmology in which the American people are the center of the universe and are deemed too-big-to-fail -- the
greater the risk that the economic crisis will be more prolonged than necessary. And the greater the suffering the crisis
will continue to cause.

There is an enormous human cost to this bank-centric dogma.

Unemployment, already at levels not seen since 1983, is skyrocketing. In many places in the country, it's approaching 20
percent (and in Detroit it's 22 percent).

Writing about the "grand book" that is the universe, Galileo declared that it "cannot be understood unless one first learns
to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. . . . Without these, one is wandering about
in a dark labyrinth."

That's where we find ourselves today, wandering about in a dark financial labyrinth -- being led by good men blinded by an
obsolete view of the world.

President Obama needs to open his inner economic circle to those untethered to this flawed way of thinking and acknowledge
that navigating our economic crisis using maps based on a cosmology that places banks at the center of the universe can only
lead to our being lost at sea for years to come.

Andy Rooney would like to mount a campaign once again to encourage people not to go anywhere as he was
looking at all the ads in newspapers and magazines for places to go. Sometimes, travel is quite unpleasant.

Andy Rooney sees the phrase "hedge fund" in the newspaper every day now and does not really know what a
"hedge fund" is. A hedge fund has something to do with money. He was surprised to find "hedge fund" in one of only six dictionaries,
but then read the definition.

America has been the greatest of all nations for a long time. But we should not forget, especially at a
crucial juncture like this, that with enough bad decisions and enough political incompetence, we can indeed manage ourselves into
decline. Even we can become Argentina.

According to most commentators, the president's press conference went a long way toward taking the spotlight off the roiling anger over AIG, bonuses and Wall Street abuses -- and putting it back where the president wants it: on the imperative need to pass his budget.

But the best laid plans of our remarkable president may be laid to waste by a bank rescue plan that is the product of exhausted ideas put together by men far too beholden to Wall Street.

To understand why a man as brilliant and accomplished as Summers can be so wrong about what to do with the banks and
Wall Street, it would be useful to turn to "The Innovator's Dilemma," by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

Jon Stewart's Jim Cramer interview was a pivotal moment -- not just for Stewart, Cramer and CNBC, but
also for journalism. Stewart kept popping into my head as I watched John King interview Dick Cheney three days later.

King opened the interview by showing clips of President Obama saying that his administration had "inherited an economic
crisis" and "inherited a big mess." He then asked Cheney: "Did you leave him a mess?"

"I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances," responded Cheney. "It's
a global financial problem. . . . So I think the notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration,
that's interesting rhetoric but I don't think anybody really cares a lot about that."

Besides being awash in toxic paper, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations,
we seem to be drowning in unknowns.

Only, I get the sense that there are fewer unknowns than we're being told. Instead,
we're greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns.

Although anointed as "the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party," Rush Limbaugh
is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the
Republican Party, Karl Rove.

"The banks are too big to fail" has been the mantra we've been hearing since September. But when you consider the
millions of American homeowners facing foreclosure, aren't they also too big to be allowed to fail? So why hasn't the foreclosure crisis gotten the attention it deserves? A combination of perverse priorities and flawed
thinking.

The first question at President Obama's primetime press conference should have been: "Mr. President, what is your priority -- bipartisanship or what is best for America? And when the two are in conflict, which are you going to choose?

Although the answer should be obvious, the president's actions over the last couple of weeks have left many wondering.

An original economic stimulus plan developed by a real estate agent in New Jersey that is currently
in the hands of the House of Representatives and every Senator in Washington D.C. The Federal Government purchases NO interest in any private property and may take NO assignment of
any lien under this plan. This plan is strictly a transparent "time-out" and "reset" of the national tax lien industry for
the sake of stopping foreclosures while simultaneously protecting investors by shoring up the absolute
bedrock of the capitalist economy which emanates directly from real property values and the taxes thereon.

There is plenty of debate about what President Obama's stimulus bill should look like -- as well there should be,
given all that is at stake. But there is a growing consensus that the guiding principle in that debate should be
Obama's call for a "new era of responsibility."

Helping fuel that consensus is the saga of the rise and fall of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, the poster
child for the Era of Irresponsibility. The condemnation of his behavior is completely bipartisan.

President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address after taking the oath of office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. The presidential inauguration is a tradition dating back to George Washington's 1789 inauguration.
President Obama's Inauguration Speech in full in text & video.

The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire
capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls, the ideology is still alive and
kicking.

An ambitious and risky undertaking carried out with hubris, and featuring the weeding out of anyone who raises alarms,
little-to-no transparency, an oversight system in which no central authority is accountable, and the deliberate
manufacturing of ambiguity and complexity so that when it all falls to pieces, the excuse who could have known can
be used

Losing your job -- or even fearing that you might -- can make you feel powerless. But at the same time you are looking for work -- or learning a new skill -- you can take up blogging. It doesn't require anyone's permission, there is no application process. You just need blogging software (some of the best is free) and the will to express yourself.